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Originally Posted by Stensie4JC
I know what you mean about it seeming strange that they use ABC's to make Chinese characters. However, the alphabet is not really that strange to them because most people educated in China in the last 20ish years (it's been part of the official curriculum since 1950, but i don't know how faithfully this was implemented before 1980) learn the alphabet as part of Chinese phonetics. Also, education in English language begins in junior high officially, although I have seen children who are beginning to learn some basic English words as early as preschool. So it's not as strange for them to use the alphabet as it is for the average American using foreign characters.
I think Chinese did begin as pictographs, but that was a loooong time ago and there's not much relationship anymore. *I* make them into pictures because it helps me remember, and it drives my (Chinese) husband crazy.
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Yes, I remember reading articles on Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Chinese Characters and how they both started very early on as pictographs, but then evolved as a combination of pictographs and phonetic symbols. Very interesting, and very beautiful, but the downside is that there are so damn many characters to learn.
I was in China from 1954 to 1956, and while I was reading English by then, I don't recall anyone teaching me any more than a tiny bit of Chinese, and I don't think I was ever challenged to read in Chinese.
Of course, I tend the think of the standard IBM style keyboard as "English" because I have seen Spanish keyboards, German keyboards, French keyboards, all of which use the Greco-Roman alphabet, but which provide for those special characters, such as umlauts and accents, that you could only create otherwise by either remapping the English keyboard or playing the old ASCII character number game (which I had to be pretty good at while in law school .... special characters for freaking everything in the damn law). Mind you, that was before they enabled special characters in pretty much every program.
I've still got a piece of Chinese calligraphy that was made for me by my Ama's husband. It's the character for "Dragon" that he gave me because I was born in the year of the Dragon. Supposedly that means I am very lucky. Someone should tell the Chinese astrology people that I am anything but.
